Kieran McNulty | Staff Writer
Collegetimes.ie has done it again. The website, which found infamy for its One-Night Stand guide for guys (a less than tasteful guide on how to get drunken girls in the sack) and other highlights such as ’20 Signs You Might Be an Assh**e’ has now given its two cents on the now world-famous SlaneGirl pictures and their subsequent Twitter drubbing.
Somehow, it finds scope in this article, which berates those who uploaded the pictures, to question the relevance of feminism. The author then announces that she has serious problems with the movement. I’m not sure how that happened either.
The article states that the people who uploaded the picture (for those of you yet to know, it depicts a possibly underage woman giving oral sex to a man in broad daylight at Eminem’s concert) should be attacked just as much as the photographed girl was. The article then segues into the observation that women are just as much to blame for sexist attitudes as men because they uphold these attitudes and attack other women based on them. The author goes on to tell us that women should not “openly scorn a woman for exercising her sexuality” and that that attitude “is not conducive to healthy female identity”. That’s just a bit ridiculous.
While others may argue how much you should condemn her-if indeed, you should (the man hasn’t been criticised nearly as much, for example), performing oral sex on several men in the bathrooms with 80,000 people nearby whilst being high is hardly the image of a healthy female identity, no? I fail to see the rule that the feminist movement prevents women on commenting on what they consider to be reprehensible. Be that as it may, criticising the feminist movement for a twitter frenzy against this girl that so many more people other than women who identify as feminists took part in is wrong.
The slut-naming culture that exists in this country seems much more responsible than that
Orla O’Callaghan (the author) also draws a comparison between this and the ongoing case of Michaella McCollum Connolly and Melissa Reid, both accused of drug smuggling. If indeed the two girls were not coerced into trafficking, Ms. O’ Callaghan asks why our ire isn’t drawn towards these two. It’s bizarre to argue this. It’s really not a comparison. It’s an unproven criminal offence, an extremely serious story which we don’t know any facts of versus a scandalous picture that shows what many deem ‘slutty’ behaviour. That’s more a question of what topics pick up buzz on Twitter, a non-issue. It, again, makes no sense to maintain that the feminist movement is to blame for this. I’m at a loss to see why it was included.
The entire article essentially makes two points: the first being that feminism is invalid if women are misogynistic and the second being that feminism is in the hands of rich women who hold other women to task, especially those that aren’t prudes about sex. The author has summed up her article by telling us that feminism is classist and racist at its core. That is not the point of feminism or the gender equality movement.
The point of feminism is to make us all equal in many respects- in our jobs, in the way we are perceived
I’m not saying that the girl deserves any of the abuse hurled at her, especially not the sexist abuse. But what I am saying is just because women attack her does not mean that feminism and its aims are now wrong. To say that it’s about women insulting other women now is incorrect. That’s just as wrong as Taylor Swift saying Tina Fey belongs in hell for making a joke about her instead of helping her, just because she was upset by it. That wasn’t a feminist issue, and neither is this.
The trial by twitter, as undesirable as it is, was not a scene of women looking down on someone because they’re in a different class or being racist. That is not the issue here and College Times are sorely mistaken. What they may have intended to write is a piece that attacks the slut-calling culture among some women in Ireland and the relatively prudish society we live in (would this have been such an issue in more sexually liberal countries?), which is a more reasonable argument to make.
What we should be asking is why we are so insulted by this photo. There are far more relevant issues here to discuss such as the likely drug abuse issues and the worry that the girl is underage. The feminist issue here is not women attacking the girl, it’s the sexist abuse that we have seen.
Feminism is not the right target of the piece. Don’t throw that name into this storm of bullies.
